1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the processing of data processing jobs in data centers.
2. Background Description
Customer applications, and other work or tasks requiring significant resources, are frequently developed at a customer site, even though customer sites may be resource limited environments. Subsequently, after development, the work may be submitted to a large data processing center for execution. Such work is sometimes referred to as “batch” work, but “batch” work may also refer to other large, distributed, or high-performance computing applications. Successful processing of the work in a large data center requires a runtime and hardware environment compatible with the development environment, regardless of whether the development was done at a customer site or at a site maintained by the data center. Submitted work developed at a customer site or other off-site facility may fail and require significant, and costly, debugging at the large data processing center.
The underlying cause of such failure is commonly the circumstance that the various components of the application (e.g., code, runtime libraries, data repositories) are individually deployed with the batch job, or may be substituted by similar—but not identical—resources in the processing center. For example, runtime libraries of the development environment may be substituted by runtime libraries of the data processing center which have subtle but consequential differences from those of the development environment.
A data center is a facility used for housing computers, communications equipment, and other hardware required to execute operating systems in virtual machines.